BET Awards surpasses the Academy Awards in social activity

BET’s major tentpole, the BET Awards took place last night, and it took over the social web. Last year’s awards saw some major integrations, and the network promised to ramp things up even further. Trendrr provided insights on the social buzz, and we spoke to BET Director of Social Media JP Lespinasse about the social TV aftermath.

According to Trendrr (infographic below), Twitter activity was 683% greater than last year’s awards. It was also the third most social tentpole in 2012, generating more buzz than the Academy Awards and the MTV Movie Awards. During the broadcast, social activity rang in at 10,051,832, an astounding number that no doubt helped with ratings. This translated to 23,932 tweets/minute. The peak of buzz happened during Usher’s performance at 8:20 p.m. when there were 115,180 tweets. Interestingly, there were 166,921 tweets before the show and 4,661 tweets after the show. Nielsen linear ratings have not been announced yet.

We spoke to Lespinasse about last night’s awards. “We were thrilled with the audience’s fervor for #BETAwards this year, we feel the star power the show attracted had a significant impact on chatter, and the on-air integrations – coupled with our amazing BET Awards app fueled the conversation immensely,” he told Lost Remote.

He further explained. “Not mentioned on this infographic from our friends at Trendrr, is our ever-growing footprint on platforms like Instagram – where we shared real-time Red Carpet photos, GetGlue – where we saw a 3x increase in check-ins to the BET AWARDS versus last year, and Google+ – where we continue to experiment with exclusive content,” he told Lost Remote. “Our Facebook TOO BIG TO PICK game got a lot of traction as well, we’ll have numbers to share later this week,” he added.

“But obviously, Twitter continues to be the driver of live #socialtv chatter – and we are pleased to continuously partner with them on these immense initiatives to continue to innovate in the social tv space,” Lespinasse added regarding Twitter.